Thursday, April 02, 2015

Murder victim's family still in Yemen

Why is Yahya Zandani still in Yemen? In an interview after the murder of his father Aharon in Yemen, he vowed to bring his wife and two children out to Israel. Instead, he went back to that war-torn country to live in a guarded compound in Sana'a with his wife's family. They are among the last 40 Jews in the capital, who are exasperating the Israeli authorities by stubbornly refusing to budge. Nevertheless, Yahya confides his fears to the Times of Israel:

Yahya Zandani with two of his brothers. The photo was taken in Israel at the funeral of Yahya's murdered father Aharon two years ago (photo: Elhanan Miller, ToI)

In June 2012, Yahya Zandani’s father, Aharon,
was stabbed to death at the main market in Sana’a. His body was brought
to Israel for burial. Nevertheless, Yahya returned to Yemen, where his
wife’s father and three brothers still live.

Today,
the family are among Yemen’s last 60 Jews — 40 of whom are huddled in a
gated government compound in the heart of what is now the
rebel-controlled capital, Sana’a.

Speaking by phone to The Times of Israel on
Tuesday, Zandani, 31, said that despite their avowedly anti-Semitic
credo, the Houthi rebels who captured Sana’a last September and have
moved south to the port city of Aden, are not threatening the Jews, at
least not yet. But he confided deep fears of what may lie in store.

Zandani was speaking from a compound known as
the touristic city — where deposed president Ali Abdullah Saleh
relocated the community in 2008 after it was driven out of the northern
province of Saada by the Houthis. Arab diplomats from Iraq and Egypt
have also moved into the compound in recent days, after their embassies
were bombed out.

Zandani said that Jews, like other Yemenis, are experiencing nightly aerial bombings by the Saudi-led coalition, but are not being singled out for their religion.

An Arab coalition headed by Saudi Arabia began
bombing Houthi strongholds across the country last week after President
Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi fled the country from Aden, which the Shiite
rebels captured in March, pleading for foreign assistance.

Houthi
Shiite fighters wearing army uniforms ride on a pickup truck as they
guard a street during a demonstration in Sanaa, Yemen, January 23, 2015.
Their sign reads ‘death to Israel, cursed be the Jews’ (photo credit:
AP/Hani Mohammed)

The motto of the Shiite insurgency, which
emerged in Saada in 2004, is “death to America, death to Israel, cursed
be the Jews, victory to Islam.” Nonetheless, the Jews have not been
targeted by the rebels to date, said Zandani.

“The situation is difficult in Yemen with
the war and everything, but there’s no [distinct] problem for the Jews,”
Zandani said. “It’s all [directed at] the government.”

“The Houthis aren’t speaking with the Jews,
but there’s still some fear,” Zandani admitted. “We don’t know who is a
Houthi and who isn’t, who’s good and who’s bad… We don’t know what the
Arabs are planning.”

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)